LETTERS TO THE EDITOR.
MR. GODKIN ON IRELAND.
[TO TEE EDITOR OF THE "SPECTATOR."] SIR,--Since writing to you a week ago, Mr. A. V. Dicey's article in the July Contemporary Review, on " Home-rule from an English Point of View," has fallen into my hands. His argument against a federal relation between the two countries is, from that point of view, I think, unanswerable. Of this, however, I do not intend to speak. I wish merely to direct your attention to the fact that his remedy for the Anglo-Irish trouble is "a change in the spirit, rather than in the Constitu- tion of England." "If Englishmen," he says, "could learn to speak and think of Irishmen with the respect and consideration due to fellow-citizens, the Union would become something more than the mere work of law." In another place, too, he says that the "brutal and stupid jests by which respectable Englishmen often hint that the bravery, the capacity, and the genius of Irishmen are of little service to the Empire, and that their value is more than counterbalanced by the ill-results of Irish discontent and sedition, conceal from unreflecting minds the extent to which every part of the United Kingdom has severally contributed to the independence and power of the
country. Irish labourers, Irish soldiers, and Irish Generals and Irish statesmen have assuredly rendered no trifling services to the British Crown."
To me, this reads like a striking corroboration from an English source of the view taken by myself, in the article in the Nine- teenth Contscry, to which you opposed such a flat denial. To you, Mr. Dicey's allusions must seem very mysterious. Never- theless, I think you owe your readers some statement of what you suppose him to mean.—I am, Sir, Sm., New York, August 28th. E. L. GODKIN.
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